


god save cain from the mother of abel

by snackbaskets



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I made up some biology, Other, Team as Family, anyways heres 3 pages of them being friends, dont @ me i passed out in that class, its Extra and Edgy, moira and genji are gay/lesbian solidarity, warnings for mild gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 19:58:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14292291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snackbaskets/pseuds/snackbaskets
Summary: short character study from moiras perspective and how she feels about genjiretribution portrays them as being pretty cool w each other and i wanted 2 go into that a lil bc i Love That Found Family Shitalso i like rly dramatic metaphors bc im gay





	god save cain from the mother of abel

“And what does that make us, Gabe? What makes us any better? He was technically a civilian, and--”

“It’s more complicated than you realize, Jesse.”

“Then fuckin’ explain it! I don’t see why you’re keeping this from us!”

“I’m trying to keep you safe!”

Moira glanced up from where she guided her biotics over Genji’s skin and rolled her eyes. He didn’t smile, but there was the barest hint of some humor in his eyes, which was a significant improvement from the empty-eyed stare he wore on the mission. It did not last long, however; Mccree bellowed something in Spanish that Gabriel spat back at, and Genji’s forehead twitched. Moira found herself mirroring the sentiment. 

“If you’re going to continue shouting,” she said. “I’d suggest you do it elsewhere. I’m working.”

For a moment, Mccree looked terribly torn between standing his ground and fleeing her ire, but Gabriel dragged him off by the collar before he could begin another ruckus, and they picked up their arguing again a moment later, muted by the wall and its garish, peeling paint. It was quiet enough to think, now, and that was an improvement.

Beneath her fingers, the bullet wound that had previously opened up Genji’s middle began to close, turning hideous, bruise green as it grew itself shut, closing up into a knot of scar tissue that began to break down into uniform, pale flesh the longer she turned her focus to it. She’d stopped him from grievous internal damage as best she could as they made the trek back, though it had drained her, keeping herself so focused on repairing the constant strain the bullet had put on his body as they fought. His fingers twitched on the table where he sat, likely fighting the urge to itch at the site as it healed. A common side effect, but not a particularly harmful one, nor one that needed remedying with much urgency. Her own wounds crawled where she had mended them, but it was nothing she hadn’t managed before, and Genji was nearly as familiar with the sensation as she. 

Her more present discomfort was the sensation of her uniform sticking to her skin where it had grown wet with Talon blood-- an unavoidable reality when one worked a man fond of shotguns, she supposed-- and it grew cold where the fan above stirred air over it, as if the dead were reaching past her flesh to house themselves in her very bones. She didn’t trouble herself with lamenting them, not when she still held a bead of lead between her fingers that had been inside Genji’s intestines only a few minutes previously, and not when Mccree was quite suitably experiencing the crisis for them all. 

“I used to be more like that,” Genji mused.

“Care to elaborate?”

“Jesse.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I struggle to see you having that much of a moral compass.”

Genji snorted.

“Oh, no, I didn’t. I was just louder about it.”

She chuckled, picking up Genji’s wrist and spilling biotic fluid over the cuts that had split over his fingers, likely the fault of shrapnel or the rough-faced buildings he’d climbed in pursuit of the assassin. She guided the droplets like mercury, watching as they congealed against his torn skin and worked to repair it. 

Genji did not lean into the contact the same as he did to Mccree, but he hardly feared it, and that fact soothed her by no small amount. She’d expected that after everything, Genji would despise her and Angela alike, and while she wouldn't have blamed him, she’d have hated to see him forced to endure their proximity when it hurt him further. 

She’d labored a long time in putting him back together, and it was no easy feat to reconstruct a bionic man, but her biotics had kept him stable in the interim while Angela built his synthetic body and tore away what couldn’t be salvaged. Moira’d developed a far more potent serum, then, as the one she had on hand was nearly worthless in making any progress in actually healing him, rather than keeping him from rot, and she’d designed it from painstaking nights spent in her lab, prodding at stem cells and dripping a litany of chemical stews into their dishes to watch them react. Too much catalyst, and they would explode, but too little, and the compound would be barely more useful that what she already had. Her solution came in more aggressive reconstruction, but it required more organic proteins to function. Blackwatch performed very few executions with their guns, anymore.

Genji, meanwhile, had heaved himself up from his grave, fueled by the lifeblood of the condemned and harrowed in his eyes by decades of age he hadn’t yet lived, but suffered for. He shambled before he walked, and choked before he talked, but his veins were filled with hyper-regenerative cell supplements, and he was more capable than even Atlas to carry the burdens on his shoulders. Moira did not stitch together his synthetic muscles when he tore them apart, and she did not sauter back the joints he shattered for the sake of destroying them, but she watched as Angela did, and offered Genji a shot of her whiskey once he’d been left to repent. In turn, Genji did not stop Jack from spitting condemnations at her, and nor did he stop Angela’s wrathful fury in finding out that Moira had weaponized their failed biotic compounds, but he did pass over her golden Erlenmeyer flask when she asked for it, and he did make sure her restraints were properly secured when she tested the serum on her own body before she did so on his. 

“I apologize.”

Genji looked up, eyes narrowed. 

“Should I be worried?”

“For all I’ve done to you, I’m quite surprised you’re not. I wonder if perhaps I’ve damaged your brain, somehow.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Nor can I.”

She tipped his hand against the lip of the beaker she carried and stoppered it with its rubber cap, sealing it away in a plastic bag before putting it back into its cushioned home in her medical kit. The beaker was labelled with a scratchy, black ‘G’, and she would dispose of its contents properly once she got back to the lab and analyzed the cellular data the biotics had picked up. Genji’s strain of biotics was unique to him, unique as the network of metal and silicon that made up his insides and one of Moira’s most proud innovations; she stripped it for the structure of his DNA after each use and used it to hybridize her cultivation of stem cells, imparting them with the knowledge of how his body fit itself together, making them even faster and more effective on him than her others were on anyone else. 

She’d built them that way, to keep him breathing, and to keep him coming back to her lab when he had no reason to be there, to keep him near enough to pass her the bottle of indicator on her desk. Moira was familiar in the art of playing God, but never had she grown more intimate with it than when she forced life into the bleeding carcass of Genji Shimada, and never had she disfigured it more thoroughly than when she bent the nature of creation to keep that life intact.

“I forgive you.”

“You dole it out so easily?”

“No. But you are not the one to blame for what I am. Neither you or Angela.”

If she were more like Gabriel, perhaps she would have embraced him. But she was not, and she settled on splaying his hand between her palms under the pretense of examining her work, as if she would ever be anything less than infallible with him.

“Let me pray never to meet the one who was,” she said. “For their sake.”

This time, Genji did smile, and the red of his eyes was the same hue as the blood that soaked into her clothes.


End file.
